They crowded round the children, touching their clothes, their shoes,
the buttons on the boys' jackets, and the coral of the girls' necklaces.

'Do say something,' whispered Anthea.

'We come,' said Cyril, with some dim remembrance of a dreadful day when
he had had to wait in an outer office while his father interviewed
a solicitor, and there had been nothing to read but the Daily
Telegraph--'we come from the world where the sun never sets. And peace
with honour is what we want. We are the great Anglo-Saxon or conquering
race. Not that we want to conquer YOU,' he added hastily. 'We only want
to look at your houses and your--well, at all you've got here, and then
we shall return to our own place, and tell of all that we have seen so
that your name may be famed.'

Cyril's speech didn't keep the crowd from pressing round and looking as
eagerly as ever at the clothing of the children. Anthea had an idea
that these people had never seen woven stuff before, and she saw how
wonderful and strange it must seem to people who had never had any
clothes but the skins of beasts. The sewing, too, of modern clothes
seemed to astonish them very much. They must have been able to sew
themselves, by the way, for men who seemed to be the chiefs wore
knickerbockers of goat-skin or deer-skin, fastened round the waist
with twisted strips of hide. And the women wore long skimpy skirts of
animals' skins. The people were not very tall, their hair was fair, and
men and women both had it short. Their eyes were blue, and that seemed
odd in Egypt. Most of them were tattooed like sailors, only more
roughly.

'What is this? What is this?' they kept asking touching the children's
clothes curiously.

Anthea hastily took off Jane's frilly lace collar and handed it to the
woman who seemed most friendly.

'Take this,' she said, 'and look at it. And leave us alone. We want to
talk among ourselves.'

She spoke in the tone of authority which she had always found successful
when she had not time to coax her baby brother to do as he was told. The
tone was just as successful now. The children were left together and the
crowd retreated. It paused a dozen yards away to look at the lace collar
and to go on talking as hard as it could.

The children will never know what those people said, though they knew
well enough that they, the four strangers, were the subject of the talk.
They tried to comfort themselves by remembering the girl's promise
of friendlines